Hogarth had expired on the 25th of October, ten days before his opponent.
Lloyd was finishing his dinner, when the news of his friend's death
arrived. He was seized with sudden sickness, and crying out, "I shall
soon follow poor Charles," was carried to a bed, whence he was never to
rise. Churchill's favourite sister, Patty, who had been engaged to Lloyd,
soon afterwards sank under the double blow. The premature death of this
most popular of the poets of the time, excited a great sensation. His
furniture and books sold excessively high; a steel pen, for instance, for
five pounds, and a pair of plated spurs for sixteen guineas. Wilkes
talked much about his "dear Churchill," but, with the exception of
burning a MS. fragmentary satire, which Churchill had begun against
Colman and Thornton, _two of his intimate friends_, and erecting an urn
to him near his cottage in the Isle of Wight, with a flaming Latin
inscription, he did nothing for his memory. The poet's brother, John, an
apothecary, survived him only one year; and his two sons, Charles and
John, inherited the vices without the genius of their father. There was,
as late as 1825, a grand-daughter of his, a Mary Churchill, who had been
a governess, surviving as a patient in St George's Hospital,--a
characteristic close to such a wayward, unfortunate race.
For the errors of Churchill, as a man, there does not seem to exist any
plea of palliation, except what may be found in the poverty of his early
circumstances, and in the strength of his later passions. The worst is,
that he never seems to have been seduced into sin through the bewildering
and bewitching mists of imagination. It was naked sensuality that he
appeared to worship, and he always sinned with his eyes open. Yet his
moral sense, though blunted, was never obliterated; and many traits of
generosity and good feeling mingled with his excesses. Choosing satire as
the field of his Muse, was partly the cause and partly the effect of an
imperfect _morale_. We are far from averring that no satirist can be a
good man, but certainly most satirists have either been very good or very
bad men. To the former class have belonged Cowper, Crabbe, &c.; to the
latter, such names as Swift, Dryden, Byron, and, we must add, Churchill.
Robust manhood, honesty, and hatred of pretence, we admit him to have
possessed; but of genuine love to humanity he seems to have been as
destitute as of fear of God, or regard for the ordinary moralities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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